Anyone who lives in or around the Greater Toronto Area, even in Canada, will likely have heard about or experienced the Highway of Heroes phenomenon which occurs whenever a fallen soldier is returned from the field of battle for a medical autopsy in Toronto. Whenever this happens, there is a spontaneous lining of the 401 by Canadians who show their support for the soldier and the troops in general.

My esteemed colleague, Bob Reid (he of Touchdowns and Fumbles fame) was so moved by this that he wrote and a song about this outpouring of support. After its debut on the Bill Carroll show, Bob spent the last year recording the song and this last Tuesday it was finally released!

The song is embedded below and if you like it, please mozy on over to HMV, iTunes or CD Baby where you can buy the song – proceeds from which will go to the military charity, Wounded Warriors. If you love the song, there are a whole bunch more people who do as well and you can connect with them on the official Facebook fan page.

Congratulations to Bob for this momentous release – I hope it is the success it deserves to be!

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Something I don’t do a good job of on this blog is letting the reader into the inner workings of the iStudio office. Partly because I’m a pretty shocking blogger right now and partly because I think that’s more for the iStudio blog. Which I’m equally delinquent on.

So perhaps that should stop and for my first trick, some blatant link/comment baiting which adds no real value apart from to direct you, the reader to some super smart people and to thank them for providing great, thought provoking content.

I was recently asked to provide a list of my favourite PR/marketing blogs for an internal elearning course. As I’ve got everything in an easy-to-cut-and-paste format, here they are, in no particular order.

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“Physician heal thyself” is a common refrain when it comes to talking about how marketing agencies market themselves.

As a rule, PR agencies do not do enough work to get themselves ink (although this story featuring my boss’ boss and FH Canada supremo Linda Smith says otherwise for Fleishman-Hillard); you rarely see ads for advertising agencies and direct marketing agencies rarely send you unwanted mail to get you to sign up with them.

…and it’s often the same at iStudio. We’re so busy doing great work for our clients that we don’t have time to turn our analysis and insight on ourselves.

iStudio Holiday 2007

Until, that is, the holidays come around. iStudio has a rich and award-winning history in the holiday card and this year is no different.

This year, after hours of brainstorming, voting by proxy and hanging chads, we went for a regifting theme – the Do Not Want Ads. That’s right – we’ve put up our old unwanted gifts for you to claim as your very own.

In the iStudio tradition, we’ve done it with our usual irreverent style and you can see right from our Flash intro that this ain’t your usual holiday card.

Once you’re into the main site, we have a classified ads theme so you can navigate around the “newspaper” with your mouse and select the products you’re interested in. Each product page has a write up from its “owner” along with some images and the ubiquitous “share on a social network/news/bookmarking site” buttons. The cool thing is that you can submit your reason for wanting each gift and the iStudio-er who submitted the gift will choose who wins that gift and has it shipped to them. Free of charge!

If you don’t want to claim the gifts for your own, you can always inflict the gift on others – virtually that is, through our Facebook app. Torment your friends and family with the miniature Genghis Khan doll or Teen Diva set by sending it to them over the magic of the Facebook.

Being iStudio, we also put in a few Easter-eggs – links to things we’ve liked over the last year and links to past holiday cards. I can guarantee you, you won’t be bored if you check it out.

Travelling Sisterhood of the Divine Ya-ya Pants. Or whatever this movie is called.

The 2007 iteration of our corporate holiday card goes a long way to showing off what we’re all about. From a consulting viewpoint, we’ve created a multi-channel integrated online communications campaign. We had an email campaign (fully compliant with CAN-SPAM regulation) that drew traffic to our campaign micro-site. We had online outreach where we included leading Canadian marketing bloggers on our list. We even have a Facebook app to support the main application and, we have had a blog and twitter push of the campaign.

Creatively, our design team really got to show off their chops with some really fantastic Flash work, wonderful animation and a user interface to die for. When you’re designing for big companies, branding guidelines can get in the way of what you really want to do with a design, so this let’s the gang really express themselves.

Similarly, the tech team did a great job putting it all together, and doing all the boring database work behind the scenes that makes the site do what we wanted it to do. And of course, we all tested the site and provided quality assurance (QA) to make sure it was all spick and span when we launched it yesterday.

So happy holidays, from all of the iStudio crew. We hope you enjoy this as much as we enjoyed putting it together for you!

“The point [of business cards] should be to demonstrate that you have good taste”

Very true, as I’m sure Patrick Bateman (VP at Pierce and Pierce) would agree.

Business cards truly are one of the most effective forms of personal/organisational branding and marketing I can think of –

They are permission (sometimes request) based.

Everyone reads them.

No-one throws them away.

You can be creative with them.

A large amount of information can be communicated with them. Email. Web site. Blog. Telephone. Key messages. Images.

They contain many different calls to action – see above.

Personally, I only have one ask when it comes to business cards – they should have enough space on the back for me to write down where I met the person and a couple of tid-bits of information about them.

Of my favourite three business cards currently in my collection two are creative – Sean Moffitt’s Agent Wildfire cards (with actual wildfire coming off the edges) and Colin Douma‘s moo cards – while the third belongs to Dyson‘s Head of International Public Relations and is more a small product brochure than a business card.

In fact, it’s a perfect example of micro-marketing from a truly remarkable organisation. (I am a proud owner/operator of a remarkable Dyson DC18)

However, I should say that I’m hardly an authority on business cards. The back of the iStudio business cards look like we work at The Gap…

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If you’re in London on Friday March 2, I can strongly recommend you hustle over to the Artesian Well in Clapham for London’s hottest underground dance party – House Rules.

Friends from my university days are hard at work ensuring anyone who goes will have the time of their life with the tracks to go with it.

Gareth Wyn (a resident at super-club Cream), Haran De Lucas, Whaid “Tiesto” Hussain and David’s P, Duffield and Griffiths will be spinning a mix of fresh, funky and downright dirty house music for your entertainment.

I’ve been to a few of these nights, back when they were in Bristol and called “Total Wreckage”. The wreckage was indeed total and they’ve always been a great night out.

1. How can you get to the critical mass of users needed to reap the benefits wikis can provide? [Sacha Chua]

2. How open are wikis? Another post to follow on this. They’re exclusive to those with Internet access, who have had the time and energy to learn whatever coding language the wiki uses, and to those who actually notice they can edit a page. Jason has some thoughts here and here. [Omar Ha Redeye]

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Everything posted on this blog is my personal opinion and does not necessarily represent the views of my employer or its clients. DDB is a global agency so any mention of any organisation could be a conflict of interests but not one that I can disclose.